America's promise compromised...

An in-depth examination of the fractured church-state divide, challenges to the independent judiciary, resurgent nineteenth-century science and socioeconomic Darwinism, as well as revisionist history that have marked U.S. right-wing politics.

...a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.
—Justice Hugo Black, Engel V. Vitale, 1962
Justice Black

At the very moment that neoconservatives profess the intent to export democracy to the Middle East, right-wing activists have agitated against U.S. representative democracy. Democracy Under Assault delineates the alliances that comprise the right-wing political machine, as well as battlegrounds of the culture war waged by biblical literalists against mainstream Christians, secularists, and other religions. Firmly rooted in nineteenth century science and economics, the political right are heirs to the Nativist movement that defined America a Christian nation. Advancing survival-of-the-fittest capitalism, they embrace bio-determinism that holds futile the redress of poverty and injustice in the face of alleged genetic inferiority.

Coopted religion, and language that forecloses debate, have marked the turn to degraded public dialogue, as tax-exempt, corporate-backed right-wing think tanks lay the linguistic foundation for conservative revolution that seeks to eliminate all social programs since the new Deal, and to bypass church-state separation and the separation of powers. Extolling reduced options for women and hearkening to the era when abortion was criminalized, Moral Majority co-founder Howard Phillips invoked return to one-family-one-vote, even as some have advocated one-family-one-paycheck in lieu of a minimum wage. A principal architect of Bush administration tax cuts, Grover Norquist, eagerly anticipates economic chaos in the states as opportunity to effectively eliminate social spending. Simultaneously, Christian Reconstructionists envision social and economic turbulence as occasion to establish a theocracy on the ruins of U.S. democracy.*

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* Recipient 2005 Merit Book Award, Colorado Independent Publishers Association
    20% of author earnings to progressive causes

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